The image below is the header that appears when I open Terminal.app. As you can see, only one tab is open, but a tab bar still shows (just has one tab that says "bash"). How can I prevent the tab bar from showing unless there are >= 2 tabs? It was working correctly until recently but I can't figure out what changed or how to fix.
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Click "View" / "Hide Tab Bar" and the tab bar will go away and come back only when there is more than one tab open.

Laurent Bristiel
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I will not have access to the computer that had this problem until Friday, but if this works then I will accept. – Kvass Jul 28 '14 at 14:44
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5I scrubbed all over the preferences panel looking for this... never occurred to me to look for a top-level menu. – bronson Oct 17 '16 at 20:13
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1After upgrading macOS, this tab preference reset, so I scoured preferences and didn't find it... they really need to move this to preferences -> General (or put it in both places). It acts like a preference because if you change it, it affects other windows. – Kelvin Aug 06 '19 at 15:35
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I'm not sure when I originally thumbs--upped this response, but I had to come back here to find it again when I apparently hit SHIFT-CMD-T without realizing it and started getting tab-headers on all my windows. – Christopher Schultz Jan 06 '23 at 18:42
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For all it's worth, in iTerm2 to achieve the same:
- To make a temporary change you need to choose
Window->Window Style->No Title Bar
. - To make a permanent change, this is part of the profile.
Preferences->Profiles->[Your Profile]->Window->Style == No Title Bar
(default isNormal
)
Update: Appologies - misread the question and added an answer for iTerm2, which may still be useful to someone. Alternatively the answer can be removed.

Alex
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2Aaah, I see - I missed that, thanks. Indeed this answer is for iTerm2, which may still be useful to someone. It took me time to find it in settings to make the change stick. – Alex Jun 29 '22 at 09:08